Sadhan Basu FNA, FASc, FRSC (2 January 1922 – 5 October 1992) was an Indian physical chemist, academic and the Palit Professor of Chemistry at the University of Calcutta from 1964 to 1985. He was known for his elucidation of the Quantum Mechanical Model of Robert S. Mulliken and his article, Degree of Polymerization and Chain Transfer in Methyl Methacrylate, co-authored by Jyotirindra Nath Sen and Santi R. Palit was the first published Indian article on polymer chemistry. He was an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Chemical Society of France, Indian Chemical Society, Indian National Science Academy and the Indian Academy of Sciences. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards, in 1962, for his contributions to chemical sciences.
Biography
Basu was born on 2 January 1922 in Kolkata (then Calcutta), to Jyotish Chandra Basu and Sarajubala. Educated in the city, he graduated with a B.Sc. from the University of Calcutta in 1942, obtaining an M.Sc. from the same university in Rajabazar Science College campus in 1944. He then conducted research into the properties of shellac at the Indian Lac Research Institute (now the Indian Institute of Natural Resins and Gums) under the supervision of noted chemist Prafulla Kumar Bose (1898-1983), for which he earned a D.Sc. from Rajabazar Science College, Calcutta University in 1948. In 1948, Basu joined the faculty of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, where he conducted pioneering research on chain transfer in radical polymerisation and established a standard procedure for estimating the molecular weight of polymers. From 1951 to 1953, he was a postdoctoral Fulbright fellow in chemistry at Indiana University Bloomington, where he developed an interest in the emerging field of quantum chemistry; upon returning to India, he published six papers on free electron molecular orbital calculations.
In 1954, Basu joined the faculty of the University of Calcutta as a reader; he would remain at the university for the next three decades. One of the pioneers of polymer chemistry in India, his studies were primarily in the fields of charge transfer interactions, ligand field spectra, hydrogen bonding, quantum chemistry and photochemistry. Focusing on the detection, and analysis of charge transfer band of molecular complexes and through experimental assignment of its vibrational structure, he supported the quantum mechanical model of the complexes originally propounded by Robert S. Mulliken, the winner of 1966 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. In order to determine the -NH2 group in nylon, he developed a methodology which has since been accepted as a standard industrial procedure. He calculated the transition energies and oscillator strengths of aromatic polyhydrocarbons using the gas model prescribed by Shin'ichirō Tomonaga in 1950, demonstrated that extended catacondensed planar structures could be derived only by using 3-4-6 membered rings and employing Hartree-Fock-Bogolyubov, illustrated that, unlike triplet transitions, the longest wavelength singlet transitions in linear polyenes converge to a limit. Basu's researches were published in a number of articles and the article, Degree of Polymerization and Chain Transfer in Methyl Methacrylate, he and his co-authors, J. N. Sen and S. R. Palit, published in 1950 was the first Indian article on polymer chemistry. He was associated with International Journal of Quantum Chemistry, the Indian Journal of Chemistry and the Proceedings of the Proceedings of Indian National Science Academy as their associate editor and mentored a number of students in their doctoral researches.